Competition
by HVK
Summary: A Finn-Thor short story, with a good slice of Finnceline; at some point after claiming his godly powers, Finn has a sparring match with Marceline over a trivial matter, because it's just plain fun to throw down with someone even tougher than he is. Marceline has more romantic intentions for getting her hands on him!


A four-page short story I wrote to flex my action writing skills and do a bit more Finnceline while I'm at it. Plus, more Finn-Thor stuff, specifically detailing around the sort of things that goes on _after _Finn gets the power of Thor and all that wacky goodness.

My intention is to base some of Finn's develoupment after Superman in some respects; Thor, as the Marvel hero, was originally conceived as Marvel's answer to Superman, which strikes me as an interesting concept to work with. In this sense, Finn is becoming a bit analogous to Silver Age Superboy.

Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted materials.

* * *

Clouds rolled overhead; through a complicated atmospheric arrangement and the movement of the wind, they seemed like a reversed funnel, a conical shape growing wider towards the bottom with the moon shining through this gap at the very top. Though these clouds were dark, they were still thin enough to see the lights of heaven's stars overhead.

The clouds seemed centered on the grasslands below, a small cropping of thickly-clustered trees grown so tall their branches winded around each other so closely that it would have been impossible for anything to slip out between them. Their leaves grew in a collective mass, a canopy thick enough that it was nearly solid. These trees were old, though, and ill-suited for this terrain. They seemed sickly, and yet they still survived. It seemed that they held each other up, surviving together where they otherwise would have perished.

These trees' branches grew high, shadowing a meadow below, and enough moonlight filtered through the small gaps in the canopy to illuminate it; standing there, facing against each other in friendly sparring, dressed in modest clothing suitable for quick movements and free agility, was a young boy in his mid-teens, chubby and small for his age, blonde hair prickled with shades of a deeper red at his roots and crammed under a bear-hat, and the other was a young woman at least eighteen, though she seemed far older than that; blue-gray skin looked even paler in the moonlight, an athletic frame displayed slim but well-defined muscles, and a huge mass of black hair gleaming with icy-blue highlights writhed like serpents. She was floating a few feet above the ground, her blue-green eyes glowing with a faint red light and her smile like a set of knives, sharper than love and nearly as fearsome.

Finn and Marceline stared evenly into each other; Finn was breathing heavily, and Marceline didn't need to breathe at all but she was still drawing shallow hissing breaths through her teeth, producing a peculiar sibilance in her muttered and oblivious observations. She was whispering to herself, thoughts echoing and speaking through her voice, quite unaware that anyone might hear.

"He hits good and he takes it good, oh yeah, this one's a _winner_," Marceline said. For a moment, it might be considered that she had thought something like that the first time she'd met Finn, and he'd earned her respect (and later, friendship) by punching her hard enough for her, the undying Queen of the Vampires through right of arms and conquest, to notice it. Once, on a night like this, when the two of them had watched the stars and Finn had made the clouds dance for her amusement, Finn had then asked her if she'd planned _this_ (and here he made a vague and peculiar gesture, trying to sum up the reality of their lives and their friendship-centric romance all at once) the first time she'd met him and he'd impressed her.

She'd only smiled then, raising an eyebrow. Finn had squirmed back into the tree branch they'd been sitting on, and she'd put a hand to his shoulder to push him even further back, and she'd whispered into his ear, "_Psh, nah. You think anyone can plan something as cool as this?_"

And then after that, the feel of her lips on his, a kiss warmer than her cool body temperature suggested, was quick and fleeting, though quickly renewed, again and again.

Here and now, though, Marceline sized up Finn. She smirked. "You ready?"

Finn shrugged. Behind them, against a tree, lay a massive hammer larger than a man, made in the style of the ancient Norse and crackling with a faint static of raw _power _given physical form. Crossed against it was an equally huge battle-axe modified into a bass guitar; two weapons of war, together in harmony. It was a suitable metaphor. "Does it really matter?"

Marceline considered. "Nah," She said with a smirk, and quicker than mortal eyes could follow the path of a winding leaf drifting overhead on an errant breeze, she _moved_-

Her bare feet made the slightest noise, brushing against the grass she flew over, moving so quickly Finn didn't even see her move, and she was suddenly right in front of him. The muscles of her shoulder and arm flexed, powering a punch moving with an unstoppable lazy grace that almost seemed to drift towards a section of his body between armpit and collarbone.

Finn didn't even bother to try to block, or counter, or do anything all besides stand perfectly still and let the punch connect; there was the faint meaty sound of flesh impacting flesh, a smaller noise of bones connecting, and then a shockwave blasted out from the relatively meager force Marceline put into that punch. The trees bended back, a veritable green cloud fountained up where old or dead leaves were torn from their branches by the force of it.

The boy came to a brief skid, stopping barely five feet away. He absently rubbed where she'd hit him on his chest, and grinned cheesily at her. "Would it make you feel better if I said 'ow'?" He asked honestly.  
"Probably not," Marceline said.

Finn, who had been named Thor a long time ago, grinned wider. The clouds rumbled, and the distant roar of thunder echoed in his head. "_My turn_," he rumbled in a voice that wasn't altogether human, and his eyes glowed like lightning.

First, he was simply standing there. Next, he was not, and only twisting wind was where he'd been standing. Marceline caught the feel of movement overhead and tensed herself, and then Finn rammed into her from the sky, hitting her with his shoulder and striking like a thunderbolt, his whole body vibrating with divine sparks.

They flew together, for a moment. It was all too brief, and immediately arrested by a tree that got in their way. It was an unfortunate tree, and certainly didn't have the ability to withstand the combined force of Finn and Marceline both being propelled at ridiculous speeds; their momentum alone might have broken it, but they smashed right through it and completely reduced it to a geyser of broken wood and splinter-shrapnel in their wake; they kept moving onwards, but now they were in the air, and though it was Finn's literal element as the reborn God of Thunder to be lord of the sky and storms, Marceline had been flying a lot longer. She put enough reverse momentum to slow them for a moment. In that moment, she pulled her head back and slammed it into Finn's head, foreheads ramming together. Finn flinched, like he'd been hit with an iron bar.

Marceline's hair writhed, cast up by her headbutting, and changed shape into thicker and disquietingly fleshy shapes, transmuting seamlessly into tentacles. Shining with nearly transparent slime, they lunged out and wrapped around the back of Finn's head, tangling in his hair, slime dripping into the back of his head and down his neck even as Marceline headbutted him again and again, minor shockwaves from the force she had to use for him to even feel any impact at all blasting off weakened branches from the trees they passed, and she maneuvered him right into smashing right into another tree.

This time, they were moving at least slow enough that they didn't smash through it but bounced off, rebounding off _another _tree and hitting the ground, skidding through rocks and mud and dirt and an unwary worm academy (the same one that Finn had once run afoul of years ago during the whole 'Glasses of Nerdicon' business, and if he'd known, he might have harbored a sense of vindictiveness). Soaked with mud and dirt, worms flying and screaming everywhere, Finn rammed his elbows into the ground and in a blast of wind propelled them back up, right through at least sixteen different branches (breaking first at least fitfully and then only brief obstacles and then outright disintegrating in their path as their velocity increased and Marceline's borderline indestructability became more lethal), and they broke out through the canopy, into the sky-

Marceline didn't actually know much about the powers of Thor or vague notions of what her Finn had been like before this incarnation, but she was pretty sure that it would be _really really REALLY _stupid to let even a fledging God of Thunder get her into open sky in the middle of a fight. Such thoughts were compounded by no less than fourteen different blasts of wind ramming into them hard enough to bend steel, all in different directions and all at the same time, and then Finn's arms wrapped around her mid-section, catching her arms and pinning them to her sides even though his reach didn't even extend to her back.

Finn squeezed, with an audible grunt like a primordial monster waking up from a long hibernation and one nasty headache. Marceline, squeezed from the front by strength enough to crack boulders into pieces in seconds alone and would have turned her entire body into globs or puddles of liquefied goo in half that time if she were mortal, managed a small grunt of annoyance.

"You aren't even _trying_," she scoffed.

Her arms tensed, muscles rising like snakes, and then she ripped free of his grip, flying up from him. Finn gasped, surprised, and then he grunted when Marceline flew back at him at ramming speed right in the stomach, flipping him in the air, and she slammed into his backside again, her arms and legs wrapping around him again, and then her hair telescoped into tentacles once more to expand far beyond what they should have been and wrapped around whatever her arms and legs hadn't seized.

Totally incased in Marceline (whether it was her arms or legs or hair, wherever he looked there was Marceline, everything he felt or touched was Marceline in front or behind, softness behind and world-breaking strength ahead and it was all Marceline, his entire _world _was nothing but her), Finn made a small squeaking noise.

Now over a mile up in the air, hot breath moved in his ear. The edges of sharp teeth pressed against his ear lobe as Marceline whispered, "_Got ya._"

She accelerated, tilting downwards, right at the meadow where they had started.

They impacted.

(The shockwave, they heard later from casual observers who'd been walking by at the time, had not only tilted everything slightly into the ground for at least two miles and collapsed an evil tunnel or two, but ripped off every single leave from that forest and right into the sky, looking suspiciously like a mushroom cloud. Finn didn't really understand the point, apart from some faint association with childhood rhyming games, but Marceline had the dignity to at least look embarrassed about it.)

Eventually, Marceline crawled out of the crater and hauled Finn out with her; as she was still completely encapsulating him, this was not hard. She rolled onto the ground, both of them breathing hard, and then rolled over one more time so she was laying on top of Finn (turning him around so he was facing her and not being squished; he was being squished anyway, but it was more fun for them this way). She did it at least partly to hear him make that adorable little squeaking noise again, and she wasn't disappointed.

Marceline chuckled. "I win!"

"Nuh uh!" Finn managed through his blushing and heavy breathing.

Marceline smirked. A tentacle moved its way up his back, wrapping around where his spine met his skull, and gently levered his head upwards. She bowed her head, nose pushing through his hair and wedging his hat back, and she kissed him soft and sweet right on the forehead. "Yeah _huh,_" Marceline countered.

Finn's small, distinctly male and wordless reply, was all the answer she needed. Again, she smirked.

"So! This time, I get to pick the movie!"

"Okay, okay," Finn conceded (given that they had nearly identical tastes in movies, it was anyone's guess why they needed to compete over it).

Marceline breathed in, breathed out, and kissed him on the lips again.. while snickering, not exactly the most refined move, but she just couldn't help herself. This time, he kissed her back.

"Marceline?" Finn eventually managed to say.

"Hmm?" Marceline said, a modulated murmur.

"…Uh…you're still like, grabbing _onto _me. In like…uh…places…"

Marceline chuckled. "Oh, I _know_."


End file.
